The Spy (49 page)

“Using those torpedoes,” said Archie.

“Against what?” wondered Bell.

TED WHITMARK WAS WAITING in the Van Dorn reception room when Bell got back to the Knickerbocker. He was holding his hat on his knees and could not meet Bell’s eye as he asked, “Is there someplace private we can talk, Mr. Bell?”

“Come on in,” Bell said, noting that Whitmark’s Harvard College tie was askew, his shoes scuffed, and his trousers in need of a pressing. He led him to his desk and moved a chair alongside so they could sit close and not be overheard. Whitmark sat, worrying his hands, gnawing his lip.

“How is Dorothy?” Bell asked to put him at ease.

“Well . . . she’s one of the things I want to talk about. But I’ll get to the main event first, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“You see, I, uh, I play cards. Often . . .”

“You gamble.”

“Yes. I gamble. And sometimes I gamble too much. I’ll hit a losing streak and, before I know it, I’m in over my head. All I’m trying to do is win back some of my losses, but sometimes it only gets worse.”

“Are you in a losing streak at the moment?” Bell asked.

“It looks that way. Yes, you could say that.” Again he fell silent.

“Can I assume that Dorothy is upset with this?”

“Well, yes, but that’s the least of it. I’ve been something of a fool. I’ve done several really stupid things. I thought I’d learned my lesson in San Francisco.”

“What happened in San Francisco?”

“I dodged a bullet out there, thanks to you.”

“What do you mean?” Bell asked, suddenly alert to a situation more serious than he had assumed.

“I mean when you stopped that cart from blowing up the Mare Island magazine, you saved my life. There would have been lot of innocent folks killed, and they would have been on my head.”

“Explain,” Bell said tersely.

“I gave them the pass and paperwork to get into the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”

“Why?”

“I owed so much money. They were going to kill me.”

“Who?”

“Well, Commodore Tommy Thompson at first. Here in New York. Then he sold my debt to a guy who had a casino in the Barbary Coast and I lost more out there and he was going to kill me. He said they’d do it slow. But all I had to do to get out of it was give him one of my wagon passes and my company invoices and show ’em the ropes and everything. I know what you’re thinking, that I allowed a saboteur onto the base, but I didn’t realize that was what they wanted. I thought it was about them landing a big contract. I thought they were doing it for the money.”

“You
hoped
they were doing it for the money,” Isaac Bell retorted coldly.

Ted Whitmark hung his head. When he finally looked up again, he had tears in his eyes. “That’s what I hoped this time, too. But I’m scared it isn’t, and something tells me this time will be worse.”

The intercommunicating phone on Bell’s desk rang. He snatched it up. “What?”

“There’s a lady out here to see you and the gent you’re with. Miss Dorothy Langner. Should I let her in?”

“No. Tell her I’ll be out there shortly.” He hung up. “Continue, Ted. What has happened this time?”

“They want me to turn over one of my trucks going into the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

“Who?”

“This smooth guy named O’Shay. I heard somebody call him Eyes. Must be his nickname. Do you know who I mean?”

“When do they want the truck?”

“Tomorrow. When the
New Hampshire
is loading food and munitions. She just finished her shakedown, and she’ll be ferrying a Marine Expeditionary Regiment to Panama to keep the Canal Zone election peaceful. My New York outfit got the provisions contract.”

“How big a truck?”

“The biggest.”

“Big enough to carry a couple of torpedoes?”

Whitmark chewed his lip. “Oh, God. Is that what they want it for?”

The door from the reception room opened, and Harry Warren walked in. Bell was turning back to Ted Whitmark when a sudden motion at the door caught his eye and he saw Dorothy Langner in a black sheath dress and black feathered hat slip through it right behind Harry Warren, who said, “Help you, ma’am?”

“I’m looking for Isaac Bell,” she said in her clear, musical voice. “There he is, I see him.” She rushed toward Bell’s desk, reaching into her handbag.

Whitmark jumped to his feet. “Hello, Dorothy. Told you I’d talk to Bell. This’ll square us, won’t it?”

Dorothy Langner searched his face. Then she looked at Bell. “Hello, Isaac. Is there someplace I could talk to Ted for a moment, in private?” Her beautiful silvery eyes were blank, and Bell had the eeriest sensation that she was blind. But she couldn’t be blind, she had just marched in under her own steam.

“I believe that Mr. Van Dorn’s office is empty. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

He guided them into Van Dorn’s office, closed the door, and stood close to it listening. He heard Whitmark repeat, “This will square us, won’t it?”

“Nothing will square us.”

“Dorothy?” asked Ted. “What are you doing?”

The answer was the sharp crack of a gunshot. Bell threw open the door. Ted Whitmark lay on his back, blood pouring from his skull. Dorothy Langner dropped the nickel pistol she was holding onto Whitmark’s chest, and said to Isaac Bell, “He killed my father.”

“Yamamoto Kenta killed your father.”

“Ted didn’t set the bomb, but he’s been passing information about Father’s work on Hull 44.”

“Did Ted tell you that?”

“He tried to get rid of his guilt confessing to me.”

Harry Warren rushed in, gun drawn, and knelt by the body. Then he grabbed Van Dorn’s telephone. “She missed,” he told Bell, and said to the operator, “Get a doctor.”

“How badly is he hurt?” asked Bell.

“She only creased him. It’s his scalp that’s bleeding so much.”

“He won’t die?”

“Not from this. In fact, I think he’s starting to wake up.”

“She didn’t shoot him,” said Bell.

“What?”

“Ted Whitmark tried to kill himself. She grabbed the gun. She saved his life.”

Harry Warren had wise, old eyes. “Tell me why he tried to kill himself, Isaac.”

“He’s a traitor. He just confessed to me that he’s been passing information to the spy.”

Harry Warren looked Bell full in the face, and said, “It appears that Miss Langner saved the louse’s life.”

The Hotel Knickerbocker’s house doctor rushed in with his bag trailed by bellhops lugging a stretcher. “Stand back, everybody. Please stand back.”

Bell led Dorothy to his desk. “Sit down.” He beckoned an apprentice. “Please bring the lady a glass of water.”

“Why did you do that?” Dorothy whispered.

“I would not have if you had succeeded in murdering him. But since you didn’t, I think you’ve been through enough without adding police charges to your misery.”

“Will the police believe it?”

“If Ted goes along with it. And I imagine he will. Now, tell me everything he told you.”

“He lost a lot of money gambling last fall in Washington. Someone in the game offered to lend him money. In exchange, he talked to Yamamoto.” She shook her head in anger and bitterness. “He still doesn’t realize that that man must have set him up to lose.”

“He told me it was bad luck,” said Bell. “Go on.”

“The same thing happened this spring in New York and then out in San Francisco. Now it’s happened again. This time, he finally realized the enormity of what he was doing. Or so he claimed. I think he was trying to get me to come back. I told him we were through. He found out about someone I’ve been seeing.”

“Farley Kent.”

“Of course you know,” she said wearily. “Van Dorns never give up. When Ted found out about Farley, I think he realized that nothing in his entire life had any truth to it. He got religion. He was probably hoping I’d be waiting when he got out of jail. Or weeping when they hung him for treason.”

“Shooting him must have disabused him of that notion,” Bell observed.

She smiled. “I’m not sure how I feel right now about not killing him. I meant to. I can’t believe I missed. I was so close.”

“In my experience,” said Bell, “people who miss a sure shot wanted to miss. Murder does not come easily to most.”

“I wish I had killed him.”

“You would hang for it.”

“I wouldn’t care.”

“Where would that leave Farley Kent?”

“Farley would—” she started to say but stopped abruptly.

Bell smiled gently. “You were about to say that Farley would understand, but you realize that is not so.”

She hung her head. “Farley would be devastated.”

“I’ve seen Farley at work. He strikes me as your sort of man. He loves his work. Do you love him?”

“Yes, I do.”

“May I have a man escort you to the Brooklyn Navy Yard?” She stood up. “Thank you. I know the way.”

Bell walked her to the door. “You made this case, Dorothy, when you vowed to clear your father’s name. No one has done more to save his and Farley’s work on Hull 44. Thanks to you, we discovered the spy, and you can rest assured we will get him.”

“Did Ted tell you anything that helps?”

Bell answered carefully, “He believes that he did. Tell me, how did Ted happen to find out about Farley Kent?”

“A letter from a busybody signed ‘A friend.’ Why are you smiling, Isaac?”

“The spy is getting desperate,” was all Bell would say, but he had a powerful feeling that O’Shay had tricked Ted Whitmark into passing him false information. The spy wanted Bell to believe that he would attack from the land when in fact he intended to attack, somehow, from the water.

Dorothy kissed his cheek and hurried down the grand stairway.

“Mr. Bell,” said the front-desk man, “Knickerbocker house dick calling for you.”

G
OT SOME UNSAVORY TYPES AT THE FRONT DOOR,” THE Hotel Knickerbocker’s house detective reported. “Claim they want to talk to you, Mr. Bell.”

“What are their names?”

“There’s a hairy oldster says he doesn’t have a name, and I’m inclined to believe him. The young ones call themselves Jimmy Richards and Marv Gordon.”

“Send ’em up.”

“They don’t look right for the lobby, if you know what I mean.”

“Understood. But they’re little Eddie Tobin’s cousins, so they’re coming in the front door. Tell the manager I authorized it. You walk with them so they don’t frighten the ladies.”

“O.K., Mr. Bell,” the house dick answered dubiously.

The Staten Island scowmen Richards and Gordon introduced their older companion, who had lanky gray hair and the squint lines from a lifetime on the water, as “Uncle Donny Darbee, who sailed us over.”

“What’s up, boys?”

“You still looking for torpedoes?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“The Navy and the Coast Guard and the Harbor Squad are swarming like mosquitoes,” said Richards.

“Searching every pier in the port,” said Gordon.

“Making it hard to do business,” muttered Uncle Donny.

“Have you seen the torpedoes?” Bell asked.

“Nope.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Nothing,” said Richards.

“Except you’re looking for them,” said Gordon.

“Nothing at all? Then what did you come to see me about?”

“We was wondering if you was interested in the Holland.”

“What Holland?”

“Biggest Holland we ever saw.”

“A Holland
submarine
?”

“YUP,” CHORUSED the Staten Island scowmen.

“Where?”

“Kill Van Kull.”

“Over on the Bayonne side.”

“Hold on, boys. If you’ve seen a submarine out in the open, it must belong to the Navy.”

“It’s hid. Under a car float.”

“Uncle Donny found it last night when the cops was chasing him.”